Trisha's Ramblings

Yesterday I had the nerve-wracking dubious alarming  great pleasure of presenting my first official MongoDB -shaped talk.  This was in the form of a webinar, which is an interesting and different format. I naïvely assumed it would be like a presentation but without the visible hand-waving, but it isn't really.  For a start, you can't easily poll the audience to find out what their level of experience is, and taking questions is quite tricky, even with the technology to support it.  Also, because you're not standing in front of people, I think the "rules" around making sure your slides don't distract from you are a little different - it strikes me that webinars are more like a set of slides with a narrator and a fixed time, than a presenter with a set of slides to emphasise points.  This puts the medium in an awkward position between an infodeck and a talk (yes, I am reading Presentation Patterns at the moment, and it's making me very conscious...

Saturday I had the pleasure of being part of the 5th London Java Community Open Conference .  This is a great event to end the conference season on - it made me feel good about being part of the LJC, and  got me excited about the prospects for 2013. The fantastic thing about an open conference is that a) you don't have to prepare like mad for it and b) the short sessions and wide variety of subjects mean that you learn stuff you didn't expect to. Given how much I've been presenting lately, and with the conferences piling on top of each other back-to-back leaving little time for preparation, I had decided not to speak at the open conference, but to sit and learn for a change - it's a great opportunity for new speakers to present for a start.  But that resolution lasted all of 3.54 milliseconds.  After all, if people don't like the sessions I propose, they won't come, so I lose nothing by suggesting some. Photo by Ged Byrne First up, it was a very great ...

Devoxx topped off a crazy two months of conferences. I've heard people talk about the conference season in the past, and been slightly (OK, very) jealous of all that jet-setting.  I'll admit, however, to a slight feeling of relief that my focus until Christmas is pretty much going to be coding.  I hope. Neal Ford's When Geek Leaks So, how was Devoxx?  Well for starters, the calibre of the speakers and talks was excellent.  I learnt things in every one I went to - either something I could put into practice at work, or something I could do to improve my own presentations.  My favourite was Neal Ford's When Geek Leaks - Neal is a great speaker, and this talk was entertaining and informative. I'm also currently reading his Presentation Patterns book, which is extremely useful.  Although obviously I give a bunch of presentations and have found some very handy tips in here, it's dead handy for everyone, even if you're just presenting to your boss or ...

The moral of today's story - be careful what you wish for. This is my brain During the normal course of my life, it's filled with Stuff. Early in November, 10gen ordered me to go to New York to learn about MongoDB (Oh No!  My Life Is So Hard!).  I was looking forward to shopping and taking photos of the devastation wrought by Sandy, but actually I spent the whole time drinking from the firehose of MongoDB information provided by my ridiculously smart, ridiculously well-informed colleagues. (I didn't even buy shoes!  But I did buy a new winter coat, so there is some balance in the world). 24 hours after landing back in in London, I was on a train on my way to Antwerp for  Devoxx .  There, I did three talks, including a new talk on Agile, co-presented with a colleague from LMAX (a teeny snippet of which can be seen in the video on the Devoxx home page).  Running from thing to thing, helping out at the  10gen ...

This week I'm at Devoxx for the whole week, and already I've achieved two things I didn't manage last year: I drank Belgian Beer and I've spent some time in Antwerp itself. It's going to be another busy conference, I'm presenting three times (thankfully one is just a quickie): Wed 13:35 - Why Open Source Your Secrets (Quickie) Wed 17:50 - Agile++: When Agile Goes Well - Co-presenting with one of my ex-colleagues from LMAX . Thu 17:50 - The Problem With Women: A Technical Approach . When I'm not talking, you should be able to find me lurking around the MongoDB stand, or at the various after-conference events that involve alcohol.

This month's Java Magazine features an article by me, Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg about the new lambdas  coming in Java 8 . The aim of the article is to give an overview to normal, human Java developers, who don't need to know the theory behind what they are or how they work under the covers, but want to know how to use them when they get the shiny new version of Java next year (or even get ahead of the curve and try them now ). Look inside > Exploring Lambda Expressions for the Java Language and the JVM

On the same day Stephen Chin came to see me at the 10gen offices, we also ran a NightHacking session in the evening with the London Java Community.  Not many people turned up (maybe I need to work on my signage to the office?) but it was a great session. In fact, having less people meant we could all be involved. Expect Raspberry Pi s and JavaFX .